Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Even the package of attributes that we call modernity was a result not of some inherent sociological process, a move out of tradition, but of a vicious geopolitical competition in which a state had to match the other great powers in modern steel production, modern militaries, and a modern, mass-based political system, or be crushed and potentially colonized.

Bismarck’s style was more akin to the term raison d’etat: calculating, amoral reason of state. Instead of principles, there were objectives; instead of morality, means.

OVER THE MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES from the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia expanded an average of fifty square miles per day.

In the story, a peasant boy, Iago, and a beautiful girl, Nunu, fall in love, despite family disapproval, but a Georgian official collaborating with the Russian empire rapes Nunu and imprisons Iago on trumped-up charges. Iago’s best friend, Koba, a brave, laconic mountaineer (mokheve), swears an oath of revenge—“I’ll make their mothers weep!”—and organizes a daring prison break for Iago. The Georgian official’s men, however, kill Iago. Nunu dies from sorrow. But Koba vows revenge, hunts down and executes the arrogant official—“It is I, Koba!”—enforcing rough justice. Koba is the novel’s only surviving character,

But it is worth underscoring that Soso Jughashvili’s surrogate father, Yakov Egnatashvili, also went by the nickname Koba, a kind of diminutive for his Georgian given name Yakobi.

Sure, the annual commemoration of Great and Holy Monday (Easter week), recalling the 1634 expulsion of the Muslim Persians, entailed a nighttime all-Gori fistfight. The town divided into teams by ethnicity, reaching a thousand or more pugilists, and the brawl was refereed by drunken priests.

Marx’s revision of French socialist thought (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and British political economy (Ricardo, Smith) rested on what the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had called the dialectic: that is, on a supposedly in-built logic of contradictions whereby forms clashed with their opposites, so that historical progress was achieved through negation and transcendence (Aufhebung). Thus, capitalism, because of its inherent contradictions, would give way, dialectically, to socialism.

Marx argued that history proceeded in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism (when everything would be plentiful)—and that the decisive motor was classes, such as the proletariat, who would push aside capitalism, just as the bourgeoisie had supposedly pushed aside feudalism and feudal lords.

“I expected to see the mountain eagle of our party, a great man, not only politically but physically, for I had formed for myself a picture of Lenin as a giant, as a stately, representative figure of a man,” Stalin would recall. “What was my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary individual, below average height, distinguished from ordinary mortals by, literally, nothing.”138 (Stalin’s writings between 1906 and 1913 would contain a mere two citations of Lenin.)

Nearly thirty-one years of age, he had no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it.

It was not simply that Nicholas II, a traditionally conservative man of family, duty, and faith, was piously committed to the “autocratic idea” without the personal wherewithal to realize it in practice. Had the hereditary tsar been a capable ruler, the future of Russia’s dynasty still would have been in trouble.175

For a Georgian from small-town Gori—via Tiflis, Chiatura, Baku, and Siberian exile—to rise anywhere near the summit of power, and seek to implement Marxist ideas, the whole world had to be brought crashing down. And it was.

As a rule, a regime perishes not because of the strength of its enemies but because of the uselessness of its defenders. Lev Tikhomirov, Russian conservative theorist, 19112

Nonetheless, the bottom line was that Russia would not allow German power to humiliate Serbia because of the repercussions for Russia’s reputation, especially following Russia’s inability to prevent Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina back in 1908.29 Nicholas II was determined to deter Austria-Hungary, which had begun mobilization, for the sake of Russia, not Serbia.

Russia risked everything, not over a dubious pan-Slavic interest in Serbia, but over what a failure to defend Serbia would do to Russia’s prestige.

although Russia had food stocks, by late January 1917, grain shipments to the capital in the north, from grain-producing regions in the south, did not even reach one sixth of the absolute lowest daily-consumption levels.141

Marxist theory held that history moved in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism—such that before advancing to socialism, it was necessary to develop the bourgeois-capitalism stage. Almost all Bolsheviks expected that the revolution would move toward socialism eventually, but the issue was when: they argued vehemently about whether the “bourgeois” or “democratic” revolution phase was complete or had to go further in order to prepare the way for the socialist revolution. Lenin was not proposing an immediate leap into socialism, which would have been blasphemy, but an acceleration of the move toward socialism—what he would call “one foot in socialism”—by not waiting for the full development of the bourgeois revolution and instead seizing political power now.86

Still, Kerensky’s chief motivation appears to have been domestic politics: he as well as some Russian generals thought—or hoped—that an offensive would restore the collapsing army and squelch the domestic rebellion. In other words, the very collapse of Russia’s army served as the key rationale for the offensive.136 “War at the front,” went the saying, “will buy peace in the rear and at the front.”137

“The whole of 1917,” one historian has aptly written, “could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing revolution to an end.”153

Sverdlov detailed the German conditions: Soviet Russia would also have to recognize the independence—under German occupation—of the breadbasket of Ukraine, as well as the oil of the Caspian Sea and the strategic Baltic ports of Finland and Estonia, all to be dominated by Germany. Further, the Bolsheviks would have to disarm all Red Guards, decommission their navy, and pay a colossal indemnity. In other words, the Germans were continuing to place a large bet on Bolshevism, while at the same time containing it and extracting advantage. To accept, the Bolsheviks were given forty-eight hours, much of which had already passed while the German document was in transit. Lenin stated that “the terms must be accepted,” otherwise, he would resign,

Russia was compelled to renounce 1.3 million square miles of territory—lands more than twice the size of Germany, and lands imperial Russia had spilled blood and treasure to conquer over centuries from Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman empire, and others. The amputation removed a quarter of Russia’s population

If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow.

There were at least 6,185 summary executions in the Red Terror of 1918—in two months. There had been 6,321 death sentences by Russian courts between 1825 and 1917, not all of them carried out.

In other words, the Great War catastrophe had not only made possible the far-fetched Bolshevik coup, it had also rendered conservative armed opposition to Bolshevism more difficult. At the same time, the Whites greatly complicated their difficult task by refusing to acknowledge peasant land seizures, thereby alienating their potential mass base.

Whatever Versailles’ deep flaws on principle, it failed utterly in terms of power politics: the United States would go home, the British would back away, and the French—who shared a land border with Germany—could not bear the burden of enforcing the treaty provisions.176 A punitive peace is punitive only if there is the unity of will to enforce it, which was lacking.

Soviet Russia’s exclusion from the peace conference—delegations were received from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine—gave Moscow additional grounds for treating the result as illegitimate. Directed against Germany and in disregard of Russia, Versailles would push the two pariahs into each other’s arms, as each would strive to resurrect its world power, forming a foundation of Stalin’s world.181

However much grain might be procured by state agents, ruined railways could not transport it all to the cities, labor was insufficient to unload the grain that did get transported, and functioning mills were too few. At the same time, perhaps 80 percent of the grain requisitioned in the name of the state was being diverted for private sale to black markets.218 In a mass exodus for survival, Moscow’s population, which had swelled during the Great War to 2 million, declined to under 1 million.219

Likewise, assertions of a Bolshevik collective leadership predating Stalin ring hollow. Lenin’s secretariat took on an essentially limitless range of issues, setting a precedent, and no one did more than Lenin to establish a living example of one-man rule at the top. (When the other “collective leaders” disagreed with Lenin, he threatened to expel them or, failing that, to quit the party and form a new one.)

Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff. Stalin, in his midforties, found his calling at the party apparatus: he was, for all his moodiness, a people person,

“Because of his enormous envy and ambition,” Trotsky would assert, “Stalin could not help feeling at every step his intellectual and moral inferiority.”272

Stalin himself never publicly voiced suspicions about the authenticity of Lenin’s dictation. He could not escape the fact that Lenin’s dictation—however it was produced—comported with a widespread view of his own character. In other words, even if it was partly or wholly concocted, the dictation rang true. Stalin’s leadership, as we saw in the previous chapter, went a long way toward holding the whole sprawling regime together, but he could be malevolent and possessed too much power.

SUCH WERE THE PARADOXES of Stalin’s vertiginous ascent: he had “boundless power” early, from spring 1922, when appointed general secretary of the party and the next month Lenin suffered his first major stroke, but only one year later, in spring 1923, out popped a sheet of paper calling for Stalin’s removal. This supremacy-insecurity dyad defined his inner regime, and shaped his character. It also paralleled the Bolshevik dictatorship’s own fraught relationship to the outside world: the supposed global inevitability of the revolutionary cause amid perilous capitalist encirclement.

Trotsky proved to be less the obstacle to than the instrument of Stalin’s aggrandizement. Just as the Bolshevik regime needed the civil war to form a state, so Stalin needed “opposition” to consolidate his personal dictatorship—and he found it. Compared with Trotsky’s delight in polemicizing against this or that regime policy, which lent itself to accusations of schism and factionalism, Stalin presented himself as the faithful defender of the Central Committee and Lenin’s legacy.

Krupskaya, meanwhile, sought to alleviate her husband’s torment and on January 19 read a tale aloud to him out of Jack London’s Love of Life (1906) about a Canadian gold prospector in the wilderness bereft of food who is followed by a wolf waiting for him to die. The next day, Lenin woke up feeling poorly; that evening, he began pointing to his eyes.

Lenin dies the next day. Implication here is that Stalin is the wolf.

Certainly many rejoiced at seeing Lenin dead. But a large number seem to have believed he was better than the other Communists, if only for having introduced the NEP, an admission of error and a humane policy.

An allowance of some degree of capitalism.

A hidden dimension to German-Soviet ties entailed clandestine military cooperation, initiated under Lenin.208 Versailles had imposed severe restrictions on the German military’s size, training, weapons production, and even the ability to send military attachés abroad, but the Soviets offered to allow Germany to violate these restrictions. Major German manufacturers (Blohm & Voss, Krupp, Albatrosswerke) were able to build submarines, aircraft, and artillery on Soviet territory, and the Reichswehr obtained secret training facilities. The Soviets, for their part, sought to attract German firms through leases, or concessions, to take over and revive moribund weapons factories.

Stalin entered the summer of 1926 amid profound disquiet over close-neighbor enmity, to say nothing of the ambiguous trajectory of the New Economic Policy. And the cursed Testament continued to hound him.

the question of choosing one of two roads,” Kamenev now explained, through near constant interruptions and accusations of Trotskyism, lying, and worse. “One of these roads is a second party. This road, under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is ruinous for the revolution. This is the road of political and class degeneration. This road is forbidden to us, excluded by the whole system of our views, by all the teachings of Lenin. . . . There remains, therefore, the second road . . . to submit completely and fully to the party. We choose this road for we are profoundly convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph in our party and through it, not outside the party and against it.”290 It turned out that Stalin had united the party after all: Kamenev’s abasement was the proof.

Modern Russian power, in its Soviet guise, too, still rested upon wheat and rye. For all the dreams of modernity, by 1928 industry had barely regained 1913 tsarist levels even with the prolonged recuperation provided by the partially legalized markets of the New Economic Policy.4 By contrast, industry in Britain and Germany was 10 percent greater than in 1913; in France, 40 percent, in the United States, a whopping 75 percent.5 Russia had lost ground.

the core dilemma of the NEP was ideological: seven years into the NEP, socialism (non-capitalism) was not in sight. NEP amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution.

What is clear is that although Stalin despised Stolypin, he found himself facing Stolypin’s challenges—the village as the key to Russia’s destiny, peasants as a supposed political problem in opposition to the reigning regime. But Stalin was proposing to force through the diametrically opposite policy: annihilation of the individual yeoman farmer, in favor of collectively worked, collectively owned farms.

The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks.

Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between 5 and 7 million people would die in the horrific famine, whose existence the regime denied.

Scholars who argue that Stalin’s collectivization was necessary in order to force a peasant country into the modern era are dead wrong.4 The Soviet Union, like imperial Russia, faced an imperative to modernize in order to survive in the brutally unsentimental international order, but market systems have been shown to be fully compatible with fast-paced industrialization, including in peasant countries. Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology

economically, collectivization failed to deliver. Stalin assumed it would increase both the state’s share of low-cost grain purchases and the overall size of the harvest, but although procurements doubled immediately, harvests shrank. Over the longer term, collective farming would not prove superior to large-scale capitalist farming or even to smaller-scale capitalist farming when the latter was provided with machinery, fertilizer, agronomy, and effective distribution.

But Stalin would charge Bukharin and Rykov with failing to accept the logic of their own Leninism. If the Soviet Union needed to mechanize agriculture on the basis of consolidated farms (it did), and if one believed this should ultimately occur within a socialist (non-capitalist) framework (at the top almost all believed so), and if the peasants were not joining collectives voluntarily (they were not), what was the Leninist conclusion?

Trotsky had never been an indefatigable, nitty-gritty administrator or a strategist capable of ruthlessly opportunistic improvisation. Whatever the overlap between his and Stalin’s core beliefs, Stalin’s abilities and resolve were an order of magnitude greater.

If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—the only kind—would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high.